Hampshire County Council privacy notice

The General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 require organisations, businesses and the government to keep your personal information secure and to only use it in accordance with the data protection principles

General Privacy Notice

We ensure that any personal information used by us or given to us is treated in accordance with data protection legislation.

This privacy notice explains how we use your personal information and the ways in which we protect your privacy.

When we collect information about you, we may provide you with a detailed privacy notice which tells you more about why we are collecting it and what we are using it for. We will only use your information in accordance with that privacy notice.

Details of the County Council’s approach to data protection can be found in the County Council’s Data Protection Policy.

How we use your personal information

We collect and use your personal information so we can provide you with statutory and other services. We use your information for the purpose for which you provided the information to include the delivery of services for you. We also use this information to monitor our performance in responding to your request.

We use your information in the following ways:

to tell you about services and provide services appropriate to you, for example highlighting additional help or services available to you

for insight purposes to allow us to analyse patterns and trends of service usage

for service and financial planning, to help us create policy and inform decision making e.g. identifying where children's centres are most needed

to process financial transactions including grants and payments involving the County Council or where the Council is acting on behalf of other government bodies e.g. Department for Work and Pensions

to help us to verify your identity if you ask us for services

to ensure that the County Council meets its duties, including those imposed by the Equality and Health and Safety Acts

where necessary for law enforcement functions e.g. licensing, planning enforcement, trading standards and food safety where the County Council is legally obliged to carry out such processing

to help investigate any concerns or complaints you have may have about the services you receive

for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims

where otherwise allowed under the General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018. For further information refer to the Information Commissioner's website

Services such as education and social care, protection of vulnerable children and adults, and the support of public health and wellbeing, may involve collecting, using and sharing special category data as defined by the General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018. We do not disclose or share this sensitive or confidential information without your explicit consent except in a small number of situations where disclosure is allowed by law, or where we have good reason to believe that failing to do so would put you or someone else at risk.

The County Council is obliged to protect public funds. We may use personal information and data-matching techniques to help us to detect and prevent fraud and ensure public money is spent in the most appropriate and cost-effective way. In order to achieve this we may share information with other organisations which audit or administer public funds. This includes the Cabinet Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, other local authorities, HM Revenue and Customs, the Police, and the National Fraud Initiative

We may use personal information to identify people who will need extra support during emergencies or major incidents e.g. emergency evacuation.

We are keen to ensure that we are providing the services that are needed and are relevant to you. If you choose to sign up for additional services, or support that may be of interest to you, you can choose to opt out of receiving information about those services or support at any time.

We may also ask for feedback on how we are performing, or ask for your views on services which you have been using.

You may not want us to collect or share your personal information, or you may set conditions on how we can use it. In these cases we may not be able to provide with the service you need, or may only be able to provide it in a limited way. There are occasions when we have a statutory obligation to collect or use personal information. In those cases we will not be able to agree to your request.

We may use ethnic, gender, sexual orientation and age information (i.e. equalities data) to compile statistics in order to comply with equality legislation and assist in planning and service provision. Such data does not identify individuals or affect your entitlement to services.

Third parties

The information we collect may be shared between County Council services and with other organisations, such as government bodies, the Police educational establishments and health and social care organisations providing you with services.

We will only share your personal information when we are permitted to or are required to by law or we have your consent to do so as required by the General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018.

The County Council does not pass personal data to other organisations for marketing purposes without your consent.

Your personal information may be processed by an external service provider acting on our behalf to provide services.

The County Council may receive personal information from third parties, for example the NHS may share the NHS Numbers of people receiving support from Social Care. This is so that the NHS and Social Care are using the same number to identify clients whilst providing care, to improve care and support.

Email

Emails that we send to you or you send to us may be kept as a record of contact. We may also store your email address for future use. If we need to email sensitive or confidential information to you, we will check that we are using the correct email address and may use additional security measures. If you need to send us sensitive information, we recommend using our secure online forms where provided or the postal service.

WebChat

We use a third party provider, SnapEngage, to support our WebChat service, which we use to handle customer enquiries in real time. All enquiries will be dealt with by Hampshire County Council staff.

If you use the WebChat service we will collect your name, email address and the contents of your WebChat session. This information will be stored in our customer database. Your information will not be shared with any other organisations, unless there is a statutory or legal requirement to do so. If you have a Hantsweb account associated with the email address you provide, a record of your session will be stored against your details. This will not contain the contents of the WebChat session.

Your rights

You may request information that we hold about you, including any CCTV images. For details about how to make a request for your own information, view the Make a Subject Access Request page on our website.

You also have the following rights regarding our use of your information. If you chose to exercise these rights, this might in some cases delay or prevent us delivering a service to you. These rights are not absolute and in some situations we will not be able to comply with your request.

You may:-

Ask us to stop using your information for the purposes of direct marketing

Object to decisions being made about you in some circumstances where decisions have been made about you based on profiling. You will be told at the point of collection if your personal information will be used for this purpose and how it will be used.

Ask us to rectify inaccurate information we hold about you

Ask us to restrict our use of your personal information

Ask us to erase your personal data

Ask us to provide your personal data to an alternative data controller

When we use your personal information on the basis of your consent you will also have the right to withdraw your consent to our use of your personal information at any time. In some circumstances, this may mean that you will no longer able to receive the service for which the personal information was collected.

Data Protection Officer

If you have any queries or concerns about how we are handling your information or if you would like to exercise your rights as described above, please contact the Council’s Data Protection Officer, data.protection@hants.gov.uk

Registration

Hampshire County Council collects and uses personal information and is registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioner's Office. Its registration number is Z7534309.

The Information Commissioner gives advice and guidance to anyone who wishes to find out more about data protection. If you believe that your personal information is not being handled correctly and you have not received a suitable response from the County Council you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Website

External links

The County Council’s website contains external links to third party sites. Our privacy notice applies only to information collected by or on behalf of the County Council. If you go to another website, you should read their privacy notice before you give them any personal details.

Cookies

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task

recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested

measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast

Our use of cookies

Google Analytics sets cookies to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage. This is to ensure that the service is available when you want it and fast.

Hantsweb uses cookies for collecting non-personal user information from the site. Hantsweb does not collect any information about you except that required for system administration of the website.

Cookies are pieces of data created when you visit a site, and contain a unique, anonymous number. They are stored in the cookie directory of your hard drive, and do not expire at the end of your session. Cookies do not contain any personal information about you and cannot be used to identify an individual user. If you choose not to accept the cookie, this will not affect your access to the majority of facilities available on our website.

Although your browser may be set up to allow the creation of cookies, you can specify that you be prompted before a site puts a cookie on your hard disk, so that you can decide whether to allow or disallow the cookie. Alternatively, you can set your computer not to accept any cookie.

This site uses Google Analytics code to gather statistical information. For more information on how Google Analytics processes this information, visit the Google Analytics website.

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